Meme of the week

ICYMI: January 22, 2017

What we wrote

Marko Savic wrote a piece to help you bridge the gap between tactical marketing metrics and revenue metrics. Regardless of your companies marketing strategy, it's important to be measuring the impact Marketing has on revenue. This is a must-read. 'Using metrics to integrate Marketing and Sales' — 6 minute read

What we're reading

Nicholas Littlewants you to forget the old approach of throw it against the wall and see what sticks with large amounts of leads, and focus on a smaller, more targeted list 🎯 Your sales process will thank you. 3 Tips to Maximize the ROI of Your Lead Gen Activities — 6 minutes

John Rode breaks down what sales capacity is, and why it's imperative to build into your plan the time it takes to get from "we need to hire more reps" to those reps being fully ramped up. What's Really Driving Your Sales Capacity? — 4 minutes

Meme of the week

Instead of going for a funny meme this week, we've got something that is ... out of this world.

Basically, the Juno probe was launched back in 2011, and it orbits around Jupiter collecting information about its atmosphere and structure. Every so often, Juno dips into low altitude starts to collects photos.

NASA released those images earlier this month and German mathematician, Eichstaedt, went to work putting the photos together into a breathtaking video that you need to watch.

Michel Feaster shares a story of how Usermind was created and how digging deep into your industry to find the most painful changes and connecting the dots is the key to creating (and owning) a new category of software.Creating a Enterprise Software Category — and Owning It — 5 minutes

Ryan Law and Emily Smith looked at the top 250 most successful SaaS companies to create The State of SaaS Content Marketing 2017. There's a number of great stats in here worth checking out. The State of SaaS Content Marketing 2017 — 12 minutes

Tracy Eiler talks with The Pedowitz Group about what it means to be a "T-shaped" marketer, where you should focus efforts in the funnel, and specific changes to make within your organization to get Sales and Marketing better aligned. CMO Insights: Tracy Eiler, Chief Marketing Officer, InsideView — 15-minute video

Tomasz Tunguz put together an interesting piece on the SaaS industry and how it's become commodified with easy-to-use infrastructure, playbooks that we all follow, and rising customer acquisition costs. He goes on to explain that this isn't a bad thing – not at all – but an opportunity. Has SaaS Become Commodified? — 3 minutes

Mike Reynolds uses Slack as an example to show how B2B SaaS Sales is shifting to B2U (Business-to-User) and what adjustments you should make to get started. The Future of B2B Software is B2U — 7 minutes